Summary A drunken male barrister approached a seated female assistant clerk whom he did not know at a dinner at a barristers’ clerks conference, lightly pushed her head downwards towards the table and away from his person and said to her in her colleagues’ presence ‘suck my dick’, moments after greeting another barrister on the clerk’s floor, his friend, at the table by sticking his middle finger out, grabbing the other barrister’s head and pulling it to and from his crotch. Continue reading “The ‘suck my dick’ case”
Supreme Courts tell legal regulators their limitation defences are bollocks
In England, the stern sounding Bar Standards Board brought disciplinary proceedings against a black barrister, Portia O’Connor, the first barrister to become a partner in one of the very modern alternative business structures they allow in old Blighty these days. They succeeded but the decision was overturned on appeal and the appellate tribunal was not complimentary about the procedures of the Board. So the barrister sued the Board for discrimination. The regulator relied on limitation defences. The Supreme Court has just decided that the defences were misconceived: O’Connor v Bar Standards Board [2017] UKSC 78. Should be an interesting case.
Meanwhile, in Kaczmarski v Victorian Legal Services Board [2017] VSC 690 the Board, represented by an external firm of solicitors and experienced counsel, tried unsuccessfully to shut an unrepresented shareholder of an incorporated legal practice out of an appeal against the reappointment of an external manager to the practice. It did so by arguing for an extraordinarily strict and as it turned out quite wrong approach to what it said was an un-extendable 7 day time limit for appealing.
I must say I’m puzzled what all the fuss was about, in view of s. 155 of the Legal Profession Uniform Law Application Act 2014. That section makes clear that nothing in the LPUL limits or restricts the Supreme Court’s administrative law jurisdiction, so that the reappointment of the external manager might have been challenged by judicial review, for which order 56 of the Supreme Court’s rules provides a 60 day extendable time limit, or under the Administrative Law Act 1978 which provides a 30 day time limit. But neither side seems to have made argument by reference to it. The bases on which the decision might have been challenged, and the relief available might well have been different between the three avenues of challenge, of course. Continue reading “Supreme Courts tell legal regulators their limitation defences are bollocks”
Holy moly! VCAT finds costs agreement void for ambiguous disclosure then orders solicitors to content themselves with original estimate
VCAT has published reasons, the first I’ve come across, dealing with the allowance of costs under a costs agreement void for disclosure defaults: Sleath v RGL [2017] VCAT 1998. Though they do not say so, it seems that the principal logic of the determination, under the same principles as the Costs Court is required to have regard to in taxations, was to keep the practitioners to their original written estimate notwithstanding subsequent oral updates. Scary stuff for lawyers if other decision makers reason similarly. Whether the Costs Court will reason similarly is an interesting question. It may be more likely that the Legal Services Commissioner will feel compelled to adopt similar reasoning in those costs disputes which it determines itself rather than referring off to VCAT. Good news for clients and third party payers if so. Continue reading “Holy moly! VCAT finds costs agreement void for ambiguous disclosure then orders solicitors to content themselves with original estimate”
Judges’ referrals to the ATO, police, Legal Services Commissioners
Often enough, judges refer the conduct of lawyers appearing before them (or disclosed by the case they are adjudicating) to the Legal Services Commissioner for investigation. A recent example is Re Manlio (no 2) [2016] VSC 130. Judges also refer the conduct of non-lawyer parties to investigative agencies, e.g. where a tax fraud is suggested by evidence in the case.
Generally, this is not done pursuant to any statutory directive or authority. An exception is s. 202 of the Legal Profession Uniform Law which requires the Costs Court to refer a matter to the Legal Services Commissioner if it considers that the legal costs charged, or any other issue raised in the assessment, may amount to unsatisfactory professional conduct or professional misconduct. (Compare s. 3.4.46 of the Legal Profession Act 2004 which authorised rather than required the Taxing Master to make a referral.)
I have never been particularly clear about the nature of such a referral, or as to the procedures which ought to be followed. Gibson DCJ set out the principles recently, at least as they apply in NSW, in Mohareb v Palmer (No. 4) [2017] NSWDC 127: Continue reading “Judges’ referrals to the ATO, police, Legal Services Commissioners”
Applicant brings case beyond jurisdiction; respondent doesn’t take the point until the last minute; no one gets costs
Jasmin Solar Pty Ltd v Fitzpatrick Legal Pty Ltd [2017] VSC 220 is a little case, but it is instructive about a number of things: solicitor-client taxations can take an awfully long time; some businesses probably don’t understand that they are ‘commercial clients’ and so fail to negotiate rights in lieu of the rights to seek taxation which, under the LPUL they no longer have; some lawyers no doubt have standardised disclosures which advise their clients that they have rights which, if they are commercial clients, they do not have; the costs proportionality provisions extend to cases where costs have become disproportionate as a result of a simple oversight by one or other side’s lawyers.
What can barristers charge for?
I gave a presentation at the really well organised Junior Bar Conference this year. The Bar sought questions which the junior barristers who attended wanted answers to. One question, which I thought odd, but which I answered earnestly, was ‘What can a barrister charge for?’ This was my answer:
The starting position is freedom of contract, such that barristers can charge for whatever they can get someone to promise to pay. The costs provisions of the LPUL (the Legal Profession Uniform Law (Victoria)) mostly do not apply in favour of commercial or government clients and commercial and government third party payers. There is newly room, therefore, for much greater creativity in contracting with such clients. Note the application of some provisions about conditional costs agreements and contingency fees, however, even in relation to such clients and such third party payers: s. 170. Continue reading “What can barristers charge for?”
Does the Legal Services Board have the power retrospectively to excuse inadvertently practising briefly without a practising certificate?
As with most years, no doubt scores of Victorian lawyers forgot to renew their practising certificates last year. For months, in some cases, this situation was allowed by the regulators to persist without intervention. In Victorian Bar Inc v GSL [2006] VCAT 435 the VCAT, constituted by Judge Bowman, Peter Jopling QC, and Ms F Harrison made clear that the disciplinary Tribunal expected regulators to be proactive to prevent practitioners inadvertently practising uncertificated. Eventually, at least in some cases, the regulators seem to have raised the issue with some practitioners whose sudden apparent cessation of practice at a young age seemed unlikely.
May I respectfully suggest that you go and check, now, whether you actually have a practising certificate for the current financial year.
The question now that the regulators have apparently complied imperfectly with VCAT’s guidance is what ought to happen? Should the practitioners who are close to blameless for practising without a certificate be given a new one with retrospective effect (some were told, for example, by their office manager that the applications had been lodged before the end of the year, and were entitled to assume that their existing practising certificate had ongoing operation pending the Board getting around to dealing with the application, by virtue of a legislative provision to that effect discussed below). Or should the full consequences of the law, including disciplinary investigation, and the refunding to clients of fees for work done while uncertificated (s. 10, LPUL), be brought to bear? The latter approach has the disadvantage of causing lawyers’ professional indemnity insurer to cancel cover during the period of non-certification and the Fidelity Fund may be unavailable to clients of the lawyers in question in relation to conduct engaged in while uncertificated.
What VCAT said was:
NSWCA surveys fines in NSW lawyers’ discipline decisions over a decade
Russo v Legal Services Commissioner [2016] NSWCA 306 was the subject of my previous post. The Court engaged in a comparatively sophisticated review of disciplinary outcomes in like cases. The purposes of this post is to reproduce that review and comment on the variables which ought to be taken into account in any proper survey of past outcomes.
To survey penalties in like cases has always been an important part of sentencing and should be an important part in imposing disciplinary sanctions. Barbaro (2014) 253 CLR 58; [2014] HCA 2 and Cth v Director, Fair Work Building Industry Inspectorate [2015] HCA 46; (2015) 326 ALR 476 do not suggest to the contrary. They say that the purpose of a survey of like sanctions is to promote consistency in penalties but not the establishment of a range of available sanctions deviation from which is appellable. Buchanan JA observed in R v Macneil-Brown [2008] VSCA 190, (2008) 20 VR 677 at [130]:
‘counsel can best assist a sentencing judge, not by advancing what they consider to be sentences at the lower or upper limits of a sound sentencing discretion, but by making submissions as to the existence and nature of aggravating and mitigating circumstances and providing some guide to the manner in which other judges have approached like cases by supplying sentencing statistics and citing passages from decided cases which bear upon aspects of the instant case.’
I would submit that any survey of fines as a disciplinary sanction must take into account, as an important aspect of the analysis, the financial situation of the person or persons liable to pay it. The specific deterrence of a fine will vary greatly from one practitioner to another. Practitioners who struggle, for personal reasons, are more likely to get themselves into trouble in the first place, and to exacerbate it by less than perfect intercourse with the Legal Services Commissioner. Their financial situations often deteriorate too. Specific deterrence may be achieved by imposition of a fine much smaller than would be imposed on a flourishing practitioner raking it in. General deterrence will also be achieved if the Tribunal is transparent in taking account of financial circumstance. In such a case, the Tribunal might indicate the kind of fine which might have been imposed had the practitioner enjoyed an average post-tax income.
Furthermore, the costs burden borne by the practitioner ought also to be taken into consideration. Costs and fine are inter-related in this way: Environment Protection Authority v Barnes [2006] NSWCCA 246 at [88] (Kirby J speaking for the Court) applied by analogy in LSC v Bechara [2009] NSWADT 313. The extraordinary costs practitioners are liable to in Victoria following disciplinary prosecutions would very often be more than adequate to achieve specific and general deterrence. If you are prosecuted and reprimanded, made the subject of an editorial on the front page of the Commissioner’s website, and have to cough up $40,000 in unrecoverable solicitor-client costs reasonably incurred and costs liability to the Legal Services Commissioner, that is going to make you think just as hard about doing it again as any comparatively trivial fine you might cop.
Finally, one must be astute to inflation. In my experience, people tend to exaggerate the effect of inflation when considering older fines. Here is a calculator which assists in measuring in today’s dollars a fine imposed some years ago.
For some reason, notwithstanding that NSW is now a part of the legal profession uniform law, the other participant in which is Victoria, no Victorian fines were part of the survey. That strikes me as unusual, since there is a whole statutory office the purpose of which is to promote interstate uniformity in the application of the Uniform Law: the Commissioner for Uniform Legal Services Regulation. Russo’s Case was decided under the old legislation which the LPUL replaced, and which legislation in fact governed the prosecution was one of the issues on appeal. Interestingly, apparently because it was thought that there were no relevant differences between the two regimes, that question was not decided.
This is what the NSWCA said about its survey of fines, and about the appropriate fine in this case: Continue reading “NSWCA surveys fines in NSW lawyers’ discipline decisions over a decade”
Legal Services Commissioner’s new decision making powers
The Victorian Legal Services Commissioner has published a report on his new proactive regulation of the profession. It tells how risk profiles of practices are being constructed with the assistance of academics to target trust audits and audits of firms more generally (a new thing for law practices which are not ILPs). It also tells about the exercise of the power to make binding decisions, and alerted me to the fact that the Commissioner now publishes redacted versions of costs determinations at this page. The report says: Continue reading “Legal Services Commissioner’s new decision making powers”
Advocates’ immunity: at once more powerful and narrower than most yet understand
Advocates’ immunity was, until recently, more powerful than many lawyers were aware. Since the 1 July 2015 introduction of the Legal Profession Uniform Law and the High Court’s May 2016 decision in Attwells v Jackson Lallic Lawyers Pty Limited,[1] however, it may be narrower than many realise. And perhaps not everyone is aware that the immunity these days is very likely peculiar to Australia; it is certainly not a feature of English, American, Canadian, Continental, Indian, South African or New Zealand law.[2] Continue reading “Advocates’ immunity: at once more powerful and narrower than most yet understand”
The Bureau de Spank’s obligation not to publish about disciplinary orders until lawyers’ appeal rights are spent
Parliament is considering a bill to re-instate the disciplinary register, and to prohibit the Bureau de Spank from trumpeting its successes before the respondent practitioners’ appeal rights are exhausted: Legal Profession Uniform Law Application Amendment Bill 2016 (Vic.). Cl. 150E of the Bill proposes to prohibit the Legal Services Board from providing to the public information about disciplinary orders made by the VCAT’s Legal Practice List while appeals or appeal rights are live. The prohibition extends beyond publication on the proposed disciplinary register to disclosure of information to the public more generally.
There is a problem with the Bill though: it focuses its protection of the profession on prohibitions of publications by the Legal Services Board about final orders. The Board shares a website and premises with the office of the Legal Services Commissioner. The CEO of the Board is in fact the Legal Services Commissioner, Michael McGarvie, who is also the applicant in all disciplinary prosecutions of lawyers in Victoria. Yet the CEO, qua Commissioner, is content for his staff to write about cases he is prosecuting, before any orders have been made and while the tribunal is considering what orders to make. On the homepage of the Board + Commissioner’s website, no less.
If parliament is concerned to ensure that the reputation of practitioners is not to be ruined by accounts of current proceedings by one of the parties to them where the aspect of things might change dramatically upon appeal, or even by bad decisions in such proceedings which are to be appealed, it ought to consider adding the Commissioner to the class of person covered by the prohibition, and to make clear that neither the Board nor the Commissioner ought publish details of disciplinary prosecutions while they are before the disciplinary tribunal.
It is not uncommon for appellate courts — the Supreme Court or the Court of Appeal — to reverse decisions unfavourable to lawyers in disciplinary prosecutions of lawyers in VCAT’s Legal Practice List, or to substitute decisions more favourable to lawyers than those of VCAT or the legal regulators. So the no publicity pending appeal proposition actually has some important work to do in the real world. Consider, to name a few, Legal Services Commissioner v McDonald [2015] VSC 237, PLP v McGarvie [2014] VSCA 253, Stirling v Legal Services Commissioner [2013] VSCA 374, Burgess v Legal Services Commissioner [2013] VSCA 142, Brereton v Legal Services Commissioner [2010] VSC 378, Byrne v Marles [2008] VSCA 78, Quinn v Law Institute of Victoria [2007] VSCA 122, Byrne v Law Institute of Victoria [2005] VSC 509. Consider also non-lawyers: Omant v Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia [2014] VSC 512, and Towie v Medical Practitioners Board of Victoria [2008] VSCA 157 where the Court found that VCAT’s standard orders in disciplinary hearings were contrary to the privilege against penalties. It will be observed that some of those decisions were made by very experienced members of VCAT’s Legal Practice List, and several by its Vice-President, a judge.
Continuing professional development obligations: plus ca change…
Today is the end of the CPD year, and the last day of operation of the Victorian Bar’s Continuing Professional Development Rules 2008 in Victoria. They are hard to find now, but you can access them here. The Legal Profession Uniform Continuing Professional Development (Barristers) Rules 2015 were made on 26 May 2015 and commenced on 1 July 2015. You can access them here. But the relevant Committee of the Victorian Bar recently determined that compliance with the old rules would be deemed to amount to compliance with the new ones for the current CPD year. The page on the Bar’s website with recent CPDs’ videos and other resources may be accessed (by barristers only) here. The most significant (possible) difference between the new and old rules for barristers other than new barristers seemed to be in relation to what amounts to a CPD activity. Under the new rules, a CPD activity must be: Continue reading “Continuing professional development obligations: plus ca change…”
Uniform Legal Services Council appointed
Following the appointment a little while ago of the inaugural Commissioner for Uniform Legal Services Regulation, Dale Boucher, The Victorian and NSW Attorneys General have announced the appointment of the Uniform Legal Services Council, the blokes who are to be responsible for the conduct rules which will shortly govern all Victorian and NSW lawyers. Their bios follow.
I am currently drafting a costs agreement to comply with the new Act and rules. Some of the law relating to costs as between solicitor and client has not yet been made, because the new Act provides for it to be made by the new rules. Some time ago the Legal Services Board circulated to the Victorian profession for comment a draft of the rules which I had assumed would come into force more or less as circulated. They were developed by the Law Council of Australia and were branded as the ‘Australian Solicitors Conduct Rules’. When it became apparent that this new Council was to be established, however, the Victorian Legal Services Board decided not to adopt them so that the Council could do its work afresh or at least unaffected by the recent adoption by one of the two participants in the ‘national scheme of a new set of rules. So there will be another round of consultation, and the detail of the new law may not be finalised until some time rather shortly prior to its commencement which was slated, last I heard, for early next year. Continue reading “Uniform Legal Services Council appointed”
Change
Just when everyone finally stopped calling the Legal Profession Act 2004 the ‘new Act’, we’re set to have another one from early next year. This is supposed to simplify things, just like the new Act was intended to simplify things. Sigh. You can read about it here (and if you do, you will learn the surprising fact that the obligation on lawyers to charge no more than fair and reasonable costs is a ‘change’ in the law.)
And there are other developments which are more obviously changes too. The functions traditionally carried out by the Law Institute, first as the regulator, and then as a delegate of the independent regulators created by statute — the issuing of practising certificates and the investigation of disciplinary complaints — are no longer being carried on by it. Old names from this part of the Institute are gone — Joe Barravecchio, Jim Leach, Helen Hartsias.
Of course Steve Mark retired recently, and the hunt continues for a new Commissioner for NSW, and Robert Brittan replaced John Briton in Queensland.
One thing that’s not changing is Victoria’s Legal Services Commissioner, Michael McGarvie, who has just been reappointed for a further 5 year term in which he will preside over an expanded local regulatory empire with exciting new powers while liaising to an unprecedented extent with his NSW — and perhaps soon other states’ — Commissioners.
But there have recently been two key new appointments worthy of reportage: Continue reading “Change”